By Alison Trude Have you ever come face-to-face with a tough problem that you just couldn’t solve? That is, until you were in the middle of a nice, long shower or an Orange is the New Black marathon, at which point the answer practically jumped out at

By Alison Trude

Have you ever come face-to-face with a tough problem that you just couldn’t solve? That is, until you were in the middle of a nice, long shower or an Orange is the New Black marathon, at which point the answer practically jumped out at you? Then congratulations, you’ve experienced an insight! When cognitive psychologists like me talk about insight, we’re talking about a process of problem solving that starts out with an impasse- you try and try, but can’t come up with the solution- and ends when the answer seemingly pops into your head out of nowhere, oftentimes when you least expect it. And if you try to explain how you came up with the answer, you’ll probably come up empty-handed. It feels very different from solving, say, a complicated math problem, where you’re able to explain the step-by-step logic that you used to reach the solution.

We think that insight may be one component of wisdom because it allows us to solve difficult problems, often in creative or unusual ways. However, one can certainly be insightful while lacking other traits that are central to wisdom. Take, for example, Sherlock Holmes (or, if you prefer, his modern-day counterpart, Dr. Greg House, from House, M.D.), both of whom regularly solve their cases with brilliant insights, but often engage in other arguably unwise behaviors, such as using drugs excessively or treating others with a lack of empathy. Still, many examples exist of people using their insightful solutions for the greater good, contributing to science, the arts, and humanitarian causes. So, although insight alone does not make us wise, it is still an important area to study if we want to fully understand what constitutes wisdom.

So where do these mysterious insights come from? And is it possible for an individual to become more insightful? By figuring out which cognitive abilities and processes drive this type of problem solving, perhaps we can identify ways to increase our chances of reaching insight regularly. However, the elusiveness of insights can make them very difficult to study, since it’s hard to know when, or if, they’ll occur. But a few studies have begun to shed light on the mental processes underlying this ability.

In one such experiment, researchers tested two groups of participants, college-age adults and senior citizens [1]. In the first part of the study, the experimenters asked them to read a short passage aloud. Scattered throughout the passage were distractor words, which weren’t a part of the story and were written in a different font. The participants were told to ignore the distractors and skip over them as they read out loud.

After reading the passage, participants solved a series of puzzles known as remote associates problems. In these problems, participants see a set of three words and have to come up with a fourth word that will make sense when combined with each word in the set. (For example, if you were given the words pine, crab, and sauce, you would answer apple.) These types of problems are very popular for studying insight, since they produce that “aha!” feeling when you solve them and it is usually difficult to explain how you came up with the solution. And, importantly for our purposes, younger and older adults seem to be equally good at solving these problems. But here’s the trick to this study: those “distractor” words were actually the solutions to some of the remote associates puzzles that the participants were about to solve. And it turned out that participants were better at solving the remote associates puzzles for which they had seen the solutions, even though they had been instructed to ignore them.

At this point, you might be feeling underwhelmed by these results. After all, isn’t it obvious that if experimenters gave the answers to the participants ahead of time, they would be better at solving the problems? When we have a problem to solve in real life, it’s rare that someone slips the answer into an email or a magazine we’re reading! More importantly, does this mean that insight is just a matter of dumb luck? That the key to solving a tough problem is just to coincidentally see or hear something as you’re walking down the street that reminds you of the answer? Something about that explanation doesn’t seem very satisfying, and it doesn’t fit with our intuitions that some people are more insightful than others, implying that they are able to reach novel insights regularly. That shouldn’t be possible if reaching insight is a matter of pure chance. Not only is this conclusion deeply unsatisfying, but, to me, it makes the phenomenon of insight less interesting. As a cognitive psychologist, I’m interested in the mental processes that allow us to solve problems and learn, understand, and remember new information. If having an insight is not a product of these mental abilities, but instead just a coincidence, then there’s not much for me to study there. Luckily, though, that isn’t the case.

There’s more to the story of the hidden remote associates solutions. Not only did seeing the solutions as distractors improve performance on the remote associates problems, it helped the senior citizens more, causing them to outperform the younger adults. Why should this be the case? One hypothesis is that, as we age, we tend to focus our attention more broadly, rather than zooming in on a particular goal or object. Subsequently, we become less likely to ignore seemingly unrelated things that we encounter in the world. (Whether this is due to biological changes in our brains due to aging or to a strategy that older adults develop over the lifespan to better take in the detail in their environment is open to debate.) Although a “lack of focus” might seem like a bad thing, in this case, if this explanation is correct, the older adults’ inability to ignore the distractors as they read aloud actually set them up to use that information when they later solved the remote associates problems. Meanwhile the younger adults, with their superior attentional control, glossed right over that valuable information.

It is worth noting that there is some other evidence suggesting that reducing attentional control helps us to reach insight and think creatively. In one study, younger adults were more likely to use distractors when solving remote associate problems (like older adults) when they were tested at an off-peak time of day, when cognitive functioning is less efficient [2]. And in another study, participants whose left prefrontal cortex (an area of the brain associated with cognitive control) was temporarily inhibited with an electrical current were better at creative tasks, such as coming up with uncommon uses for everyday items [3].

But, even if it’s the case that older adults do cast a wider attentional net, making them appear more insightful in a specific laboratory task, does that necessarily mean that in real life, the older we get, the more insightful we become? One might imagine that that same broad scope of attention that helped older adults solve the remote associates problems could also make them better at solving interpersonal problems by allowing them to notice subtle social cues in others that younger adults might miss. Or that it might make them more resourceful; for example, by thinking to grab that Alka-Seltzer in the medicine cabinet when the kitchen sink gets clogged.

Older adults also have something else working in their favor: a wealth of life experience. By virtue of interacting with certain objects or finding themselves in certain situations over and over again during the course of their lives, older adults may have built up a wider store of knowledge upon which to draw when they are faced with a problem. These factors could help to explain why older adults are often perceived as being wiser, but age may also work against us in our path to insightfulness. Other researchers have argued that some abilities linked to insight, such as creative thinking, tend to decline with age [4]. There is plenty more work to be done in this area before we can say for sure whether our elders have rightfully earned their reputation for increased wisdom.

But one thing that readers of all ages can take away from this research is that, when we’re stumped by a problem that requires a creative or non-linear solution, one counterintuitive thing we can try to break through the impasse is to not think too hard about solving the problem. So go ahead and take that long shower or fire up your Netflix account. By temporarily losing focus on your goal and broadening your sphere of attention, you might be less likely to disregard those things in your environment that might, at face value, be considered distractors, but that might just hold the key to your next big insight. Who knows? You just might find yourself getting lucky and, by extension, wiser, more often.

Brenda Huskey

By Alison Trude Have you ever come face-to-face with a tough problem that you just couldn’t solve? That is, until you were in the middle of a nice, long shower or an Orange is the New Black marathon, at which point the answer practically jumped out at

By Alison Trude

Have you ever come face-to-face with a tough problem that you just couldn’t solve? That is, until you were in the middle of a nice, long shower or an Orange is the New Black marathon, at which point the answer practically jumped out at you? Then congratulations, you’ve experienced an insight! When cognitive psychologists like me talk about insight, we’re talking about a process of problem solving that starts out with an impasse- you try and try, but can’t come up with the solution- and ends when the answer seemingly pops into your head out of nowhere, oftentimes when you least expect it. And if you try to explain how you came up with the answer, you’ll probably come up empty-handed. It feels very different from solving, say, a complicated math problem, where you’re able to explain the step-by-step logic that you used to reach the solution.

We think that insight may be one component of wisdom because it allows us to solve difficult problems, often in creative or unusual ways. However, one can certainly be insightful while lacking other traits that are central to wisdom. Take, for example, Sherlock Holmes (or, if you prefer, his modern-day counterpart, Dr. Greg House, from House, M.D.), both of whom regularly solve their cases with brilliant insights, but often engage in other arguably unwise behaviors, such as using drugs excessively or treating others with a lack of empathy. Still, many examples exist of people using their insightful solutions for the greater good, contributing to science, the arts, and humanitarian causes. So, although insight alone does not make us wise, it is still an important area to study if we want to fully understand what constitutes wisdom.

So where do these mysterious insights come from? And is it possible for an individual to become more insightful? By figuring out which cognitive abilities and processes drive this type of problem solving, perhaps we can identify ways to increase our chances of reaching insight regularly. However, the elusiveness of insights can make them very difficult to study, since it’s hard to know when, or if, they’ll occur. But a few studies have begun to shed light on the mental processes underlying this ability.

In one such experiment, researchers tested two groups of participants, college-age adults and senior citizens [1]. In the first part of the study, the experimenters asked them to read a short passage aloud. Scattered throughout the passage were distractor words, which weren’t a part of the story and were written in a different font. The participants were told to ignore the distractors and skip over them as they read out loud.

After reading the passage, participants solved a series of puzzles known as remote associates problems. In these problems, participants see a set of three words and have to come up with a fourth word that will make sense when combined with each word in the set. (For example, if you were given the words pine, crab, and sauce, you would answer apple.) These types of problems are very popular for studying insight, since they produce that “aha!” feeling when you solve them and it is usually difficult to explain how you came up with the solution. And, importantly for our purposes, younger and older adults seem to be equally good at solving these problems. But here’s the trick to this study: those “distractor” words were actually the solutions to some of the remote associates puzzles that the participants were about to solve. And it turned out that participants were better at solving the remote associates puzzles for which they had seen the solutions, even though they had been instructed to ignore them.

At this point, you might be feeling underwhelmed by these results. After all, isn’t it obvious that if experimenters gave the answers to the participants ahead of time, they would be better at solving the problems? When we have a problem to solve in real life, it’s rare that someone slips the answer into an email or a magazine we’re reading! More importantly, does this mean that insight is just a matter of dumb luck? That the key to solving a tough problem is just to coincidentally see or hear something as you’re walking down the street that reminds you of the answer? Something about that explanation doesn’t seem very satisfying, and it doesn’t fit with our intuitions that some people are more insightful than others, implying that they are able to reach novel insights regularly. That shouldn’t be possible if reaching insight is a matter of pure chance. Not only is this conclusion deeply unsatisfying, but, to me, it makes the phenomenon of insight less interesting. As a cognitive psychologist, I’m interested in the mental processes that allow us to solve problems and learn, understand, and remember new information. If having an insight is not a product of these mental abilities, but instead just a coincidence, then there’s not much for me to study there. Luckily, though, that isn’t the case.

There’s more to the story of the hidden remote associates solutions. Not only did seeing the solutions as distractors improve performance on the remote associates problems, it helped the senior citizens more, causing them to outperform the younger adults. Why should this be the case? One hypothesis is that, as we age, we tend to focus our attention more broadly, rather than zooming in on a particular goal or object. Subsequently, we become less likely to ignore seemingly unrelated things that we encounter in the world. (Whether this is due to biological changes in our brains due to aging or to a strategy that older adults develop over the lifespan to better take in the detail in their environment is open to debate.) Although a “lack of focus” might seem like a bad thing, in this case, if this explanation is correct, the older adults’ inability to ignore the distractors as they read aloud actually set them up to use that information when they later solved the remote associates problems. Meanwhile the younger adults, with their superior attentional control, glossed right over that valuable information.

It is worth noting that there is some other evidence suggesting that reducing attentional control helps us to reach insight and think creatively. In one study, younger adults were more likely to use distractors when solving remote associate problems (like older adults) when they were tested at an off-peak time of day, when cognitive functioning is less efficient [2]. And in another study, participants whose left prefrontal cortex (an area of the brain associated with cognitive control) was temporarily inhibited with an electrical current were better at creative tasks, such as coming up with uncommon uses for everyday items [3].

But, even if it’s the case that older adults do cast a wider attentional net, making them appear more insightful in a specific laboratory task, does that necessarily mean that in real life, the older we get, the more insightful we become? One might imagine that that same broad scope of attention that helped older adults solve the remote associates problems could also make them better at solving interpersonal problems by allowing them to notice subtle social cues in others that younger adults might miss. Or that it might make them more resourceful; for example, by thinking to grab that Alka-Seltzer in the medicine cabinet when the kitchen sink gets clogged.

Older adults also have something else working in their favor: a wealth of life experience. By virtue of interacting with certain objects or finding themselves in certain situations over and over again during the course of their lives, older adults may have built up a wider store of knowledge upon which to draw when they are faced with a problem. These factors could help to explain why older adults are often perceived as being wiser, but age may also work against us in our path to insightfulness. Other researchers have argued that some abilities linked to insight, such as creative thinking, tend to decline with age [4]. There is plenty more work to be done in this area before we can say for sure whether our elders have rightfully earned their reputation for increased wisdom.

But one thing that readers of all ages can take away from this research is that, when we’re stumped by a problem that requires a creative or non-linear solution, one counterintuitive thing we can try to break through the impasse is to not think too hard about solving the problem. So go ahead and take that long shower or fire up your Netflix account. By temporarily losing focus on your goal and broadening your sphere of attention, you might be less likely to disregard those things in your environment that might, at face value, be considered distractors, but that might just hold the key to your next big insight. Who knows? You just might find yourself getting lucky and, by extension, wiser, more often.

Kykosa Kajangu

The late French Jesuit, Fr. Eric de Rosny was an anthropologist whose research went deep like a giant root in the exploration of African wisdom traditions. In his seminal book, “Healers in the Night,” Fr. de Rosny makes the statement below that can shed

The late French Jesuit, Fr. Eric de Rosny was an anthropologist whose research went deep like a giant root in the exploration of African wisdom traditions. In his seminal book, “Healers in the Night,” Fr. de Rosny makes the statement below that can shed light to Dr. Alison Trude’s question, where do mysterious insights come from?
"Everyone has four eyes (miso manei). As a rule, [humans] close their two visible eyes at the hour of death, and open the other two in the kingdom of the ancestors. But it happens that certain persons (bewusu) are born with all four eyes open. This anomaly, at once feared and desired, is discovered when a child catches a glimpse of someone passing by, and then it is learned that that person has died. In such a case, parents generally hasten to have the pair of eyes that see the invisible “put out” (tuba), by a special treatment, for a child does not have the strength to bear such revelations without harm. Those who “put out” eyes also have the power to open them" (de Rosny 1985: 216-217).
This statement refers to the African belief that the human being has four eyes: two physical eyes and two spiritual eyes. On the one hand, the human being has two physical eyes, the eyes of the body, which open up at birth and close at death. These eyes guide the human being as he reaps the fertility of the earth. On the other hand, the human being has two spiritual eyes, the eyes of the soul, which close at birth and re-open at death. These eyes guide human beings as they explore life beyond the limits of the material universe.
In my exploration of African wisdom traditions, I sat at the feet of sages and found out that they use their “spiritual eyes” to unveil life’s mysteries, and in so doing they enjoy unbelievable “eureka moments” or insights that Dr. Trude refers to. I trust that dialogues of mutual enrichment with sages of various indigenous wisdom traditions can help to shed light to the source of cognitive abilities and mental processes that deliver mysterious insights. These dialogues can make it possible for researchers to travel in the old trails of knowledge where they would discover new ways of understanding their truths about mysterious insights.